End land hoarding. BNP´s practical response to ConDem mid-term waffle

Tue, 08/01/2013 - 14:15

* A big increase in available building plots making new homes more affordable and taking pressure off the green-belt.
* Immediate extra income for cash-strapped councils to put into renovating older houses
* More jobs for British building workers

These are the three main benefits that would spring from a simple yet effective proposal by Nick Griffin and the BNP´s housing advisory team.

The plan would deal with the problem of land hoarding by the big developers. Millions of Brits are homeless or in sub-standard accommodation, millions more are being bled white by the cost of keeping a roof over their heads.

Yet the construction giants are sitting on a staggering 400,000 unused planning consents.

This boosts their paper valuations and helps keep the price of building land high, yet it condemns millions to housing misery.

Artificial shortage

The resulting artificial shortage of new-build land is also cynically exploited by the very same developers in their demand that the government should allow them to bulldoze and concrete over vast swathes of rural England.

For the ConDem regime to propose to solve Britain’s housing crisis by providing ´help´ for young families to take on massive mortgages, rather than dealing with this key underlying cause of high prices and the housing shortage, shows all too clearly the extent to which the Tories in particular are in the pockets of the big developers.

3% Contribution

The new British National Party proposal is to levy a 3% Unused Utility Contribution on the market valuation of all outstanding planning consents which have not been developed and completed for occupation within 15 months.

This would be payable every two years by the developer who owns the consent.
In addition to being a very effective tool to end the market distortion of land hoarding, this simple tax is also highly moral, since the massively raised value of land with planning permission comes not from any effort or investment by the developers but rather from the consent of the community and its representatives in local government.

Recycled into affordable housing

In order to increase further the effectiveness of the Unused Utility Contribution as a way of dealing with the housing crisis, the money raised would be ring-fenced for use within six months through the Homes and Communities Agency to provide affordable housing, especially through grants for the rehabilitation of older housing.

This will help stop the parallel scandal of the New Labour policy, now being continued by the ConDem regime, of wholesale demolition of working class housing in order to clear the way for more profitable Yuppie developments and gentrification social engineering.

This policy to break the stranglehold of the big developers´ cartel was proposed to Tory Housing Minster Mark Prisk at a fringe meeting at the Conservative conference last autumn, but the idea has been rejected.

Tories - corrupt to the core!

This is despite the fact that the policy that would not only give an immediate and huge boost to house building and the fight against homelessness, but would also remove the artificial distortion impose by a monopolistic cartel of big developers.

As such it should in theory appeal to the Tories´ ideological support for free markets.

The ugly truth, of course, is that the Tory party has been bought and paid for by giant building firms.

As the Daily Telegraph revealed on 9th December 2011, the Conservatives pocketed a staggering £3.3 million in donations from developers in just three years

"As with other innovative BNP housing proposals, it’s a fairly safe bet that this policy will be stolen by Labour within a few months," warns Nick Griffin.

"Of course, this is galling, but at the same time it is gratifying to see our ideas being taken on by others. After all, we’re in this to get things done to make Britain a better place, so to an extent it doesn’t matter who puts our policies into practice.

"That said, when Ed Balls´ wife, Yvette Cooper, was Housing Minister, she was challenged about what she would do to get the 400,000 hoarded building plots into use.

She didn’t have a clue and the housing experts at the meeting watched her gormless goldfish impersonation with cynical amusement."

Yet again, it’s the British National Party that is both free from the shackles of lobbying corruption and blessed with the far-sighted vision need to make Britain better.